this thread made me think of a very dear sister friend who was so sure she was pregnant, complete with expanding belly & flutters, but continued to test neg on home tests. many of us noticed at one point that her belly stopped growing, but remained quite prominent & we pleaded with her to seek a physician or midwife to confirm pg. midwife palpated & found no signs of pregnancy & detected no heartbeat. it turned out to be an intestinal issue & not a pregnancy.

And in my own opinion, MDC has a great UA--aiming at a model of communication which I aspire to (and sometimes fall short of badly!).

My opinion also. And at the risk of getting this thread shut down for continually discussing the UA I'll add that while nothing human-controlled is going to be perfect, and while I myself have not been happy in the past about mod decisions (including one very recent one,) MDC is by far the safest-feeling forum I've ever participated in, and that's precisely because of the work that the mods do. For me it's a good trade-off, but not something, obivously, that everyone is interested in.

Quote:

Originally Posted by sewathomemama

this thread made me think of a very dear sister friend who was so sure she was pregnant, complete with expanding belly & flutters, but continued to test neg on home tests.

Yeah. I have no opinion on whether this should be relevant to the OP (she says it's not, fine by me to go with that) but just to respond to this post specifically, I've had that experience too. Never with the intuitive sense of pregnancy (that's always come without physical symptoms, strangely enough) but definitely felt like it physically. In fact, for a while I had myself half-convinced that I had some enormous parasite jumping around inside of me. It was that freaky feeling. The doctor tried to reassure me that it was simply bloating and gas. And it did eventually go away.

The MU is a rationalist and tends towards agnostic athiesm. I'm Episcopalian and tends towards a bit of the spiritual thing.

I knew I'd be pregnant before my best friend's wedding. I ended up having just concieved (implanted the week before). I'd been convinced my first child was going to be a boy, until I fell pregnant. I felt the baby settle last week.

He knows all that, and tends to think it's bunkum. He tends to think of it in terms of my 'second thoughts' to steal a Terry Pratchett idea - the parts of myself that are more aware and less likely to be emotional.

None of that has harmed our relationship. We work through it. Even though I knew I was pregnant from implantation, it took until week 8 for him to really feel it himself - positive pregnancy tests and all. Mostly because he wants this baby so badly that he didn't want to get too attached too early. And because he doesn't live his whole life that way, I respected his choice to maintain an emotional distance that made him feel safe. My mother did the same thing - she did it because she's had a lot of miscarriages and hurt from that. The MU hasn't experience that, but I think he carries some baggage from being sent to live with his grandparents as a four year old for health reasons. He needs a lot of reassurance and can't get that from an embryo, so he needs external proof of that continued existence.

If you think your reasoning trumps his, simply because you feel it does, then he isn't going to be able to open up to you. Simple as that. I'm not going to comment on you being pregnant or not, but a rationalist needing proof is not a character flaw. It's an emotional health technique - he may trust you implicitly, but you are not your intuition. the MU has seen me pick up things no-one else knows, work things out without knowing how (like the time a random dream made me wake up and tell him our friend was pregnant - she announced to us 2 weeks later that she'd just found out she was pregnant). He still doesn't trust the concept of my intuition, but he trusts me and I trust him.